In Staffing Policies, Charter Schools Seen as 'Innovative'

When it comes to hiring, paying, and firing teachers, charter
schools are more like private schools than traditional public ones, a
report suggests.

The study, by economists Michael Podgursky and Dale Ballou, looks at
results from a recent survey of 132 charter schools in seven states
with relatively large numbers of the independent public schools. The
study was sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington
think tank that supports the idea of charter schools.

If charter schools are allowed to depart from the personnel
practices of regular public schools, they tend to do exactly that,
conclude the researchers, who have studied teacher labor-market issues.
For instance, administrators often hire uncertified teachers, many
schools offer pay for performance and bonuses in hard-to-staff
subjects, and teacher dismissals are common.

The surveyed schools were drawn from a random sample of 200 charter
schools open for at least three years in the seven states that account
for the bulk of such schools. Those same states—Arizona,
California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, and
Texas—also provide a relatively large degree of freedom to
charter schools, the authors say.

"Where you have fairly strong charter school laws that are supposed to
allow flexibility, the schools are taking advantage of it," said Mr.
Ballou, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

In the study, the authors compare charter schools to both private
and traditional public schools within the seven states, drawing mostly
on federal data but also on survey responses from 32 private
schools.

Trade-Offs Cited

Mr. Ballou and Mr. Podgursky, a professor at the University of
Missouri- Columbia, caution that their conclusions may not apply in
states that grant charter schools less freedom. Moreover, they
acknowledge, administrators who are more venturesome in handling
personnel decisions may have been the most motivated to respond to the
survey.

Compared with other public schools, the authors say, charter schools
tend to have fewer students per teacher and higher staff
turnover—patterns seen in private schools. Charter schools also
have more part-time and inexperienced teachers—twice the ratio of
those with less than three years' experience than regular public
schools have.

"In effect, both charter and private schools 'trade off' experience
for smaller average class size, with charters doing even more of this
than private schools," the report says.

In addition, compared with conventional public schools, charter
schools are "much more likely" to employ teachers who lack regular
state certification, the researchers found.

Teachers in charter schools also enjoy fewer job protections than
their counterparts in traditional public schools. Most of the teachers
in those charter schools surveyed had one-year contracts, few were
represented by unions, and most worked in schools where firings were
fairly common. Four out of five charter schools indicated they had
terminated at least one teacher for poor performance over a year's
time.

In contrast to most traditional public schools, about a third of the
charter schools surveyed did not base salary growth on experience, and
nearly 40 percent did not reward teachers on the basis of coursework
and degrees. Nearly half the surveyed schools used performance pay,
either on an individual basis, or for their staffs as a whole. Those
findings resemble those for the sample of private schools, the authors
say.

While the report is primarily descriptive, Mr. Podgursky and Mr.
Ballou call the personnel practices of the surveyed charter schools
"innovative" and say they contribute to a better mix of "viable
options" for educators to get and keep good teachers.

Deanna Duby, a policy analyst for the largest U.S. teachers' union,
the National Education Association, said the differences between
charter schools and other public schools are not necessarily positive,
as the report tends to portray them. "You have to investigate further,
and you have to decide whether these are good things or bad things,"
she said.

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